The niche and paratextual industries of games and play

Get to the Festival: Final Rules and Reflection

Throughout the duration of BCM300, I have learned that there is a large amount of effort that goes into creating everyone’s favourite games. I learned that creating a good game is more than just a great idea, it’s about the planning, the rules and the mechanics.

In my previous blog post, I drafted what I thought were my final rules for the game, however within playtesting it became apparent there was one mechanic that was problematic. One of the final rules was that the game ends, when the bonus and setback cards run out. This mechanic falls flat within the game and so in its place I decided to incorporate game-ending cards.

There will be game-ending cards in both bonus and setback stacks, however there will be fewer of them in the bonus cards. A game-ending card in the bonus deck means that the player who draws the card, instantly…